Emerging Writers Series: Tiphanie Yanique & Keya Mitra

Start: Apr 18 2010 5:30 pm

End: Apr 18 2010 7:30 pm

For a leper, many things are impossible, and many other things are easily done. Babalao Chuck said he could fly to the other side of the island and peek at the nuns bathing. And when a man with no hands claims that he can fly, you listen.

“With turns to the wild, clever, and magical that seem at once fantastic and inevitable, Tiphanie Yanique has crafted a beautiful collection of short and not-so-short fiction. This is an exciting new voice.” —Percival Everett

"How To Escape From a Leper Colony is fiction of the first rank...So few of us can hope to see with any clarity, much less make sense of, this world, but Yanique--and we should be profoundly grateful for this--sees and understands a very great deal indeed." —Ben Fountain

Brazos warmly welcomes Tiphanie Yanique and Keya Mitra for our Emerging Writers Series. Yanique, who received her MFA in creative writing at UH in 2006 and was subsequently the Parks Fellow/Writer-in-Residence at Rice University, has earned stunning, well-founded praise for her new book of stories and a novella, How to Escape from a Leper Colony. With the release of this book she will become the first native US Virgin Islander to publish a work of literary fiction. When asked if she sees herself as a Caribbean writer, Yanique responded, "Absolutely. I embrace the title. I’m happy to be in the box."

The review of her book in Publishers Weekly says, "The effects of colonialism throb in Yanique's vivid debut collection....The Bridge Stories are elucidating snapshots of islanders struggling to carve out lives for themselves on St. Thomas and elsewhere amid an exploitative tourist economy. Yanique frequently dips into rich, fanciful vernacular, such as in Street Man, a beautiful, sad glimpse at a doomed love affair between a college student and a St. Croix local. In the affecting novella, International Shop of Coffins, Yanique depicts characters of mixed

African/Creole/Indian descent torn between the white and island worlds in all their complexity and conflictedness. A smattering of dark humor leavens the tense narratives as Yanique penetrates the perils and pleasures of lives lived outside resort walls."

Tiphanie Yanique is review editor with New York University's Calabash. A former Fulbright Scholar, she has received the Mary Grant Charles Award for fiction, the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Tufts University Africana Prize for Creativity, and fellowship residencies with Bread Loaf, Callaloo, Squaw Valley, and the Cropper Foundation for Caribbean Writers. She is the recipient of a 2008 Pushcart Prize, the 2006 Boston Review Fiction Prize, and was the Parks Fellow/Writer-in-Residence at Rice University. She is now a professor of Creative Writing and Caribbean Literature at Drew University. She is from the Virgin Islands and commutes between St. Thomas and Brooklyn, New York.

Keya Mitra received her MFA in fiction at the University of Houston, where she is currently finishing her PhD in fiction and literature. She recently came back to Houston after spending a year in India on a Fulbright grant in creative writing. Her fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices 2007, Ontario Review, Orchid, Event, Fourteen Hills, Torpedo, and Confrontation, and her non-fiction has been published in Gulf Coast and American Literary Review. Mitra received a scholarship to the 2005 Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, was an Honorable Mention for the Atlantic's 2004-2005 student fiction competition, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in fiction. She also received the 2004-2005 Barthelme Fellowship in fiction.